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Comment by stoolpigeon | Hacker News Reader

When I moved from the US to Hungary it took a year maybe for me to really relax and realize for the first time how much stress I'd been carrying - all around guns.

If you had tried to talk to me about it before I had lived here I would have told you that you were crazy and that the US is really safe. And in a lot of ways it is safe, but the emotional reaction is legitimate and completely understandable.

The first time we took our kids back, one night we were out front of the house we were staying in. A truck drove by on the street and the girls kind of huddled together. I said, "What's wrong?" They said, "We don't want to get shot."

When you live in an environment where the idea of just any random person having and using a gun is close to unthinkable, shifting to an environment where anyone could have and use a gun at any time is stressful.

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As long as you realize it is irrational.

I’ve lived in the west and south all my 50 plus years, with a couple years spent overseas, and I’ve never seen a gun drawn or shot in anger.

I spend zero time worrying about gun violence because there is no rational reason to.

Now, I’ve lived in suburbs (no gated communities, just straight middle class) instead of large metros, though I’ve worked in plenty of the same. I’ve felt unsafe in those metros, but it had little to no relationship to guns, just people who acted out in the train or bus or aggressive in their panhandling.

I’m no gun fanatic- been to a few events hosted by friends where I shot their guns at targets, but never have owned one. But unless you live in Baltimore or similar environments, the US is absolutely safe, statistically, for one to work/play/live in without spending any thought to protecting yourself from gun violence.

> But unless you live in Baltimore or similar environments, the US is absolutely safe, statistically, for one to work/play/live in without spending any thought to protecting yourself from gun violence.

Your mileage may vary:

My high school, in a nice safe San Diego suburb, had a mass shooting a few years after I graduated. One of my favorite teachers retired that year because he couldn’t go back to the place where a student had bled out in his arms while he was trying to tourniquet him.

I met the Aurora, CO movie theater killer when he was a UCSD student working on our lab cluster. Good thing I never WONTFIX-ed his support tickets… In what is possibly the most American game of small world, a now-coworker used to go to the late show at that theater often but not that night.

A friend of ours had a close call and lockdown due to a disgruntled employee bringing a gun to his office (past armed guards!), a mile from where I work.

My wife’s school had a full hostage negotiation one afternoon when a student made a threat. They talked him out of it but … it’s not exactly hard to imagine that it could have gone the other way.

Nobody I’ve met from outside of the U.S. has even one story like that, even the ones from countries we look down on.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/3/24/coronavirus-trigger...

“ “We are selling five times as much as in a normal March,” said Gabor Vass, who runs three gun shops in the Hungarian capital, including the one where Rostas bought his gas pistol.”

Right, but

1) Even 5x as normal is probably what your average Walmart sells in a day? (I'm paraphrasing, no idea how many guns walmarts actually sell)

2) I don't know about Hungarian gun laws, but I imagine you can't just go in and buy a guy without a permit? Also, are handguns permitted? Gas pistol implies like a CO2 powered air gun?

> 2) I don't know about Hungarian gun laws, but I imagine you can't just go in and buy a guy without a permit?

Yes, you need a permit, though illegal gun ownership is somewhat of an issue. Getting a permit isn't easy, from what I hear.

> Also, are handguns permitted?

Yes.

> Gas pistol implies like a CO2 powered air gun?

No, they're guns that shoot tear gas and the like, and can often also be used for launching small pyrotechnics. The barrel is usually obstructed to make sure they can't be used to shoot projectiles. Theoretically, they could be manipulated to fire projectiles, but it's complicated, difficult, illegal, and probably easier and cheaper to just buy the real thing.

That article proves my point. They are taking about people buying air guns that fire rubber bullets.

In 2019 the rate of gun deaths per 100000 people in Hungary was 0.61 and in the USA it was 3.96

There are things I worry about but mass shootings like those that happen in the US on a regular basis are not one of them. Violent crime in general is very low here.

Hahaha. Title under the header photo.

>Gun dealers in Hungary's capital can sell gas pistols, like this Ekol Firat Magnum, to people without a weapons licence

Oh, the horror...

However, even small weapons not requiring a license can be very dangerous in the wrong hands, given that even non-combat gas pistols can be lethal at close range. And Vass, the gun shop owner, said the interest does not stop there.

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